Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com
I'm Ian, I'm at the James Julia Auction House today
looking at some of the machine guns that they're
going to be selling in their October of 2015 auction.
And when I saw this 1915 CSRG Chauchat on their inventory list,
I figured this would be an excellent time to try and break
some of the really persistent myths about this gun.
So if you know anything about this, you probably know
that it's the worst gun ever designed, ever, by anybody.
However, that's not really the case.
The Chauchat has an absolutely miserable reputation,
and a lot of it isn't well deserved.
Now, this gun had problems, it's not ideal,
it's certainly not the best light machine gun ever made.
It's not even one of the best, but for its time, given what your other options were at the time,
and given some of the realities instead of some of the long-perpetuated myths,
this actually wasn't that bad of a gun.
So, let's start with the fact that this is chambered for the 8mm Lebel cartridge.
This was the standard French cartridge from World War One.
It's a very heavily tapered cartridge, that's why this magazine is semi-circular.
Because you've got a pointy bullet and a very wide rim here,
and when you stack 20 of these together they make this very nice curve. That prevents rimlock.
It's a single stack magazine.
And the French manufactured more than 250,000 of these guns in 8mm Lebel.
They were the most common automatic weapon of the First World War.
This is what you would see, most of the time, when you saw a machine gun in Allied hands.
The Allies also had Lewis guns, but they had a lot more of these than they did Lewis guns.
Now, late in the war in 1918, the US Army was starting to come into the war,
and the US military was horribly under-equipped and had basically no machine guns.
They had some 1909 Benét-Merciés, but very few of them.
Eventually they got some Lewis guns, but not very many of them.
And what they had for a long time were French weapons, they had French Chauchat automatic rifles.
Well in 1918 the US contracted to buy Chauchats built in .30-06 calibre.
Instead of this semi-circular magazine they actually had a box magazine here,
only held, I believe, 16 rounds instead of 20.
And the problem was these 1918 .30-06 guns had some significant design problems.
Most importantly the chambers were reamed incorrectly on them.
And they did not work, more than half of them were rejected at inspection.
And the ones that didn't get rejected outright were sent to US troops, and they were used in training.
And the guns were terrible. It's almost impossible today to find a picture of a .30-06 Chauchat used in combat
for the very reason that they were such bad guns that troops would train with them
to learn basic tactics and how to run the guns.
And then when they actually went into combat, the guns would be replaced with 8mm Lebel versions that actually worked.
So, a lot of the US troops impressions of these guns were formed during their training
with these .30-06 examples that were horrible. The 8mm guns actually worked pretty well.
You'll see some people say that .30-06 was too powerful of a cartridge
for the Chauchat, that's not really true. The 8mm Lebel is not a slouch of a cartridge,
the World War One loading was a 198 grain bullet traveling at 2,400 feet per second.
That is slightly less energy than a .30-06 but not a whole lot less.
The problem with the .30-06 Chauchat was it ... was a calibre conversion that wasn't done right
basically, the mechanism is certainly capable of it.
After the war a number of other countries, Romania, Belgium, Poland, a couple others I believe that I'm leaving out,
used the Chauchat, deliberately, and they converted it to 7.65 Mauser calibre.
So if it'll work in 7.65 Mauser it would work in .30-06, if you did it right.
Anyway, thats part of where this gun's reputation comes from is
these troops training with an acknowledged incorrectly built version of the gun.
Now another major area that problems arose with the Chauchat was with the magazine.
You can see even from that far away that the magazine has these two big holes cut in it.
And if you're on a clean firing range that's fine, it works.
And there was a reason for this, the idea was you'd actually have two man teams.
You'd have one man shooting and of course he's right handed, so he's holding this on his right hip.
Which means that these holes in the magazine are exposed outward of his body,
and that's where the assistant gunner is either lying down next to him or advancing with him.
The assistant gunner uses these holes to watch the ammunition capacity in the magazine.
And when it's empty the assistant gunner reloads the gun while the gunner continues to hold it.
So thats why there are holes in the magazine, so the assistant can keep an eye on what's actually going on.
Unfortunately, when you start talking about things like trench warfare and Flanders,
those hole are going to accumulate mud before you can look at them twice.
And that caused a lot of problems.
Automatic weapons are always heavily dependent on good quality magazines,
and most of the problems with the Chauchat came from the magazines.
In addition to these holes, the metal that they're made out of is quite thin.
It can be pretty easily dented, the feed lips can be damaged, it was not a good magazine design.
And that was probably the single biggest let-down of the gun.
On the other hand, if you keep the magazines clean, take care of them,
make sure that they're all in good shape, the guns will run pretty well.
The next most commonly espoused problem with these guns was that they would jam up when they were fired too much.
And that's another instance of an exaggerated myth based on a kernel of truth.
So the way these guns work is the long-recoil action.
If ... you're into American guns, this is the exact same action that would be used in your Remington Model 8 or 81,
the exact same action is in your Browning Auto-5 shotgun.
The idea is the barrel and bolt are locked together, they travel all the way back,
the bolt is then held at the rear of the action, the barrel goes forward under spring pressure,
... the barrel then pulls off the empty case, which is then ejected.
Once the barrel's all the way forward, then the bolt is released,
bolt travels forward, picks up a new cartridge, loads it, and you're ready to fire again.
That action works pretty well, it's actually a very strong, very safe action.
The problem that they had with the Chauchat was that the barrel has an aluminium radiator jacket on it for cooling.
And if you fired it heavily the parts obviously heat up,
and the aluminium jacket and the steel outer casing...
First off, the jacket gets a lot hotter than the casing does, which is kind of the idea.
and the jacket will expand, which everything does under heat.
And ... my understanding is after about 200 to 300 rounds of pretty much ... continuous fire,
the jacket will heat up to the point that it has expanded,
and friction prevents it from moving back and forth inside the outer shell of the gun.
Now because this is a long-recoil gun the charging handle is attached to the bolt,
and if the barrel doesn't go all the way forward under spring pressure,
there isn't a handle that you can use to manually push it forward.
So if you dump 300 rounds through this, which would be 15 magazines in a row,
and the barrel jacket, the cooling jacket, heats up and jams in there
there's really nothing you can do to force it to keep working.
What you have to do is wait for it to cool, which will take 5 or 10 minutes,
and when that happens ... the gun is sitting there cooling and out of nowhere it goes kerchunk,
and the barrel moves back forward as soon as it's cooled enough and shrunk down.
And then you can continue firing.
You'll hear reports of troopers who would bang them against trees, ... the idea being
if you can jar this, maybe you can release ... whatever point is sticky and get the barrel forward.
So my response to that complaint is it's kind of a trade-off that one has to accept.
The Chauchat was the very first automatic rifle really put into use and into combat.
And part of that designation of being an automatic rifle is that it's lighter than a light machine gun.
This was significantly lighter than the Lewis gun.
It was something that one man really could easily hold, shoot, and move with.
It's 9.5 kilograms, that's about 21 pounds.
The result of having to make a gun light is that you make some design trade-offs
with things like this potential for overheating.
The answer is don't shoot it 300 rounds without stopping, it's not intended for that.
Sustained fire was supposed to be done by one of the heavy machine guns, like the Hotchkiss.
This was intermittent fire on the move while advancing, or during tactical manoeuvers.
Now there are some other less significant complaints about the gun.
The pistol grip is uncomfortable people say, OK, fine.
The bipod is not really a very good bipod, it could definitely be better.
Because this has a long recoil action ... there's a lot of moving weight when you pull the trigger.
The bolt is quite large and heavy, and the bolt slams forward to fire because it fires from an open bolt.
That makes it, as a practical matter, difficult to shoot accurately.
Now once youre used to it and practiced with it, fundamentally they're actually remarkably accurate guns.
It's just hard to get that out of them because of the open bolt system.
One other interesting feature of these guns is that they had a really, really slow rate of fire.
Rate of fire on this was only 240 rounds per minute, that's 4 rounds per second,
and that's about half of what you get in almost all other machine guns.
Whether that's good or bad, it's kinda hard to say.
I think it's important to remember that when these were in use
... for all practical purposes, there were no semi-automatic rifles in the French military.
They had bolt action Lebels and bolt action Berthiers.
So this isn't just serving as a machine gun.
Today we would think of a light machine gun as having to provide a
significant volume of firepower advantage over, say, a standard AR-15 rifle.
Well, any semi-automatic rifle would have been a major increase in firepower over the bolt action guns that were being used.
So this kind of bridges the gap between a self-loading rifle and a light machine gun,
that's deliberate, that's this automatic rifle niche that it occupies.
So, even at a very low rate of fire, remember that this allows
the soldier with it to fire twenty rounds repeatedly with just the pull of the trigger.
And if he wants to put suppressive fire on an area he doesn't even have to use it semi-automatically,
he just has to hold the trigger down and it will continue firing for him.
That's a significant advantage and improvement in 1915.
I think some of that gets put in an improper perspective today.
So the standard rumour is that these have a ton of recoil, and they can't make it through an entire magazine.
So you know what I'm going to do? I am actually gonna start this off by trying to dump a full magazine.
Actually it's 19 rounds, we're gonna be a little gentle on this mag. It is 100 years old.
So, 19 rounds out of the Chauchat, this is Prvi Partizan ammo, so this is new production stuff.
And it pretty well duplicates the original World War One load, which was 198 grain at about 2,400 feet per second.
Let's see how it works.
That's semi.
Alright, full-auto.
18 rounds in the mag after one round fired in semi-auto mode.
Well how about that?
Gun ran perfectly, it has that nice low rate of fire that they talk about.
Something I noticed is, and I was kind of expecting this,
there is a lot of reciprocating mass going back and forth because of the long recoil system.
You've got both the bolt and the barrel moving, sometimes together and sometimes separately.
And that causes your sights to bounce quite a bit.
However, the low rate of fire actually kind of gives you a chance to keep your sight picture in between shots.
So, while I would not be able to shoot good target groups with this thing,
I was actually able to hold it on a specific spot on my berm and have a nice beaten zone.
Which is kind of what the goal would be with a gun like this.
This is a suppressive fire sort of weapon when fired from the bipod.
Let's reload it and do some more.
So my sense at this point is pretty much the same as after the first magazine,
the recoil isn't particularly heavy or unpleasant
but it is jarring in a physical sense.
It really moves you around, doesn't hurt, but it's moving you around.
And it does make it difficult to keep a good sight picture.
Now on the other hand, the sights on this gun are quite large and they're easy to pick up.
It's interesting, my experience with a BAR is that the sights are tiny to the point of almost being useless.
The gun is a little more stable when you're shooting it,
but the sights are so small that they're basically impossible to use while firing just like this.
It's an interesting comparison.
Alright guys, so what I want to show you is the proper position to shoot a Chauchat from.
This is important for your shooting comfort.
The French had a thing they called "la gifle" which was if you put your face on this back plug of the gun,
this ridge hits you in the cheek and hurts really bad.
So you're not supposed to do that, what you want to do is put your cheek
up here on the back of the receiver tube.
And that requires being positioned at about 45 degrees to the gun.
Now I think this is part of where this gun's bad reputation comes from,
US troops in World War One would have been trained with
diligent marksmanship practice that would involve being directly behind your rifle.
And if you set up in that position on the Chauchat it's not going to go well.
Instead,
and I have this from original French manuals, you want to have your body out at about a 45 degree angle to the gun,
get a sight picture, your face is nice and far forward. And that's how you shoot it.
Let's go ahead and demonstrate.
There you go, that is the correct position to shoot a Chauchat comfortably and effectively.
Alright guys, so we've done a bunch of shooting now, we've actually put ...
When I finish this magazine we will have put 100 rounds through this gun,
and we will havem had so far a grand total of zero malfunctions.
A lot of the problems with these guns are due to the fact that they're 100 years old and they haven't been taken care of well.
And that really colours a lot of people's opinions and perceptions of them.
But I'll tell you what, think of this kind of like the Sten gun of the light machine gun world.
The French needed a gun, they needed it now, and they needed a lot of them.
And they put together this thing. It may not look pretty, but they worked, and they got the job done.
- Allez les boches.
- Kameraden ...
It gets the job done.
Thanks for watching guys, I hope you enjoyed the video.
I hope I did a decent job of conveying what some of the truths and some of the myths of the Chauchat really are.
If you would like to own this gun yourself, having now seen that it works,
go ahead and take a look at the link in the text description below.
This is of course for sale from James Julia here, and you can take a look at their pictures and their description.
... Chauchats, because of their terrible reputation, are actually one of the least expensive machine guns you can buy.
This one's in really good condition, and I think it would make a great shooter for someone who would appreciate it.
So, check it out.
Thanks for watching, good luck.